Starting up a superfight

It starts with a shift in tone. Minor and barely perceptible at first, a firm no gradually becomes a soft one before morphing into a maybe. After that comes a yes, or at least an OK, fine.

Then it’s on. It’s superfight time. Put away the scales and get out your wallet.

That’s how I imagine it will happen, anyway, if it ever does. That’s how it seems to be happening, though in fairness we haven’t quite gotten around to the actual fighting part because we’re still stuck on the shifting tone part. And man, is it ever an excruciating process.

Take Jon Jones, for example, who showed up backstage at KeyArena in Seattle on Saturday night wearing a t-shirt, a diamond-encrusted crucifix and a broad smile. He was there to tell reporters how awesome this next season of “The Ultimate Fighter” is. How awesome? According to Jones, it’s so awesome that he’s “heard [UFC president] Dana [White] quoted like four times now saying that this is by far the best season he’s ever been involved in.” And we know White would never say that if it wasn’t irrefutably true, right?

But of course, Jones couldn’t make an appearance before the media without being forced to utter Anderson Silva’s name. That would be preposterous. So when it came time to talk about a potential superfight with the middleweight champ, Jones started out with his usual line about how he’s in no hurry to fight anyone in particular, or even to fight out of his own division, which is ironic, considering how he seems to keep ending up in fights with middleweights lately.

But as Jones kept discussing the topic, his tone began to change.

“Everything’s a possibility,” he said. “I really can’t count too much out. I do believe that we’re put on this earth to think big and dream big and not limit ourselves, and fighting Anderson would be a definite testament of my faith and my warrior spirit. Who knows what will happen in the future?”

Even Jones could tell right away how these comments would play in the media. “Sounds like we’re breaking, me and Anderson, doesn’t it?” he added almost immediately. “Sounds like the story’s twisting. I’m up for whatever.”

And so it begins.

Remember a few months ago, when it was absolutely off the table, according to both Jones and Silva? Yeah, that was then. Kind of like how, at one point, Jones and former teammate Rashad Evans were both rock solid in their opposition to a potential fight. Then one guy softens his stance just barely, the other guy responds by softening his a little more, and the next thing you know we might just have a fight on our hands. In a sport where even the baddest men on the planet are conditioned to do almost anything to avoid looking like they’re scared, it might be just that easy to make the impossible possible.

It could be that this is how it will always be with fighters. The same reason why they might never have a union – individual combat sports don’t lend themselves to long-term teamwork, we’re told over and over again – is also the reason why promoters can usually convince any two people to punch each other in the face for money.

That’s the how of the superfight. The why is a little trickier.

The more the MMA world obsesses over the idea of seeing two champions from different divisions fight it out, the more I find myself wondering if we’re not so fixated on it primarily because of how difficult it seems to put together. Fighters are usually so eager to beat each other up, since that’s how they get paid. When we stumble on two who struggle against the current that’s trying to throw them together, we became weirdly intent on seeing their resistance broken by the erosive powers of money, time and public pressure.

What’s really weird about it is that, in almost every case, we assume that the bigger fighter will win, which is the exact reason we have weight classes to begin with. The taller, younger, lankier Jones seems to have an edge on Silva, which might be why Silva is so reluctant to fight him while being so open to the idea of fighting welterweight champ Georges St-Pierre, who in turn just wants to be left alone to fight guys his own size.

That makes sense for the smaller guy. Why should he have to fight someone with a size advantage on him? Why should that be the reward for being the best fighter at his own weight? But offer him a chance to make millions and enhance his legacy by picking on someone smaller, and suddenly the superfight sounds like a pretty good idea.

If both fighters were equally interested, and if it didn’t seem like a bad deal for one of them, I wonder if we’d have the same obsessive fixation on it. I wonder if we wouldn’t be more content to let weight classes serve the purpose they were created for. We’d probably still be interested in seeing the best from one division against the best of another, but we might be more capable of acknowledging the inherent unfairness of it upfront, rather than acting like it’s somehow something we’re owed.

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